News:Guide Dog Foundation Letter
I just received a letter from the Guide Dog Foundation in the mail. Unfortunately, our sponsored puppy, Kahlem, did not make it through the program due to behavioral issues -- maybe we shouldn't have named her after me after all? Hah! If you'd like to see the letter I received and the picture of the grown up Kahlem, Click Here! Note: The girl in the picture isn't me, neither is the dog, hehe. Also, I'm sorry for being so inactive this year! I've gotten a "real" 40 hour a week job, which keeps me very busy, and I've also been spending a lot of my free time volunteering and hanging out with friends. I hope that you can understand that just as Furry Paws has changed a lot in the nearly 6 years it's been open, I (and my life) has changed a lot too, and I don't have anywhere near the time I used to spend working on Furry Paws. I've seen some of you say that you wish I'd give Furry Paws to someone else if I don't have the time to work on it. If I really thought that this was the best move for Furry Paws, I would do it, but I'm not convinced that it is. Furry Paws is a fully functional dog sim game. Yes, new features are really nice, and are great for keeping the game active and fresh, but at this point, they're not completely essential to the health of the game. With any website changing hands there will be direction changes. In some cases this can be very good, in some cases bad. I've resisted turning Furry Paws into an ad-filled, ad-focused site, even though that would generate a lot of revenue for me, because it's against my vision and my values for the site. I doubt that I could find a web developer skilled enough and passionate enough to take on a project like this and still maintain an ad-free environment. And of course, I have selfish reasons to. I'm very attached to Furry Paws, and very committed to it, even though I know that doesn't show very well in how absent I've been. I made a promise (or what I consider as good as a promise) to revamp Furry Paws and I'm still committed to doing so, but the time frame is going to be substantially longer than I had first estimated. The good news is that since starting my "real" job my web development skills have been improving exponentially. When I finally do get the time to do the Furry Paws revamp, I should be able to do a very good job of it -- especially compared to the taped together version I made 6 years ago! It's kind of cool that a page that used to take me 2 days to develop now takes me a 2 hours. I didn't mean for this news post to turn into an essay, oops. So I'll go ahead and wrap up by saying that I appreciate your understanding in this situation. I appreciate each one of you who's stuck with Furry Paws even throughout it's periods of admin inactivity. And I can't say thank you enough to the mods who have kept Furry Paws clean while I've been absent -- and of course, thank you to the players who have been kind enough to follow the rules, and make both less work for the mods and the site a much better place to be.